Tips and tricks

Take stock of your phone usage

30th Aug 19

While most people see spring cleaning as something reserved for homes, a change of season is also perfect for taking stock of all areas of your life, including your phone usage. Here are some tips and tricks for digital decluttering.

Take stock of your smartphone time

While smartphones play important roles in both our work and social lives, it’s important to ensure that your usage isn’t excessive. Luckily, companies are focusing on digital wellbeing and there are now plenty of ways to make sure that your smartphone doesn’t negatively impact your health.

To evaluate how much time you’re actually spending on your phone and within apps, you can use an app such as YourHour. The app is aimed at curbing smartphone addiction and overuse.

Within YourHour, you can track which apps you use the most as well as how much you use your phone overall. You can also set limits as to how much time you spend on your phone, with the app issuing warnings about your usage. It also includes challenges to help you reduce the time spent on specific apps.

Reorganise your phone’s storage

If your phone’s storage becomes cluttered with excess apps and files, its performance will suffer. Every few months you should make sure to backup and delete unnecessary files as well as apps you don’t use anymore.

Use Cloud apps such as Google Photos to backup your images and remove the duplicates on your device. Go through your list of apps and if you haven’t used an app in a while, delete it. This is especially true for mobile games you don’t play anymore. You can usually back up your progress in Google Play Games or by linking your Facebook account so that you can always pick up where you left off.

Finally, in your file manager, clear out your phone’s downloads folder and get rid of any documents you don’t need anymore.

Review your settings

Both phones and apps receive updates every now and then that gives users more control and extra functionality. However, we often don’t notice these until we do an overview of our settings.

Make sure that your settings are optimised for your personal usage and privacy. Many apps such as Facebook and YouTube have rolled out data-saving modes you can enable in the app settings.

You can also tweak your notification and syncing settings in your most-used apps to make sure that they’re not taking up more battery power and data than needed.